Susanne Erichsen

Susanne Erichsen née Firle (born December 30, 1925 in Berlin-Steglitz ; † January 13, 2002 in Berlin ) was a German beauty queen as well as a mannequin , model and entrepreneur .

Life

On June 15, 1945 she married the Norwegian Sven Erichsen. The almost 20-year-old and her newlywed husband were deported and taken to Soviet forced labor camps. Susanne Erichsen was separated from her husband and never saw him again. Forced to rebuild Stalinogorsk, she did two years of hard labor. She didn't come home until 1947. She continued the surname as a stage name even after a second failed connection.

Back in Germany, she was discovered by a photographer and fashion journalist and worked as a mannequin and model in the following years.

During a vacation on Sylt , she took part in the Miss Schleswig-Holstein election in early summer 1950 and won.

On September 2, 1950, the 24-year-old Berlin woman in the Kurhaus was Baden-Baden to Miss Germany crowned. The mannequin, for a year the top model of great Berlin fashion designers such as Heinz Oestergaard and Gehringer & Glupp, had participated in the election, supposedly just for fun. The award ceremony almost turned into a scandal: Five of the seven judges protested because Susanne Erichsen had been married before and thus violated the regulations. But their marriage was officially annulled after just a few months.

Less than a week later (on September 9th) she took part in the Miss Europe election in Rimini .

In 1952 she traveled to the USA as the "German Fashion Ambassador". The press was enthusiastic about the dark-haired German. She declared her a " Miss Miracle ". The result was a name that was to become the epitome of the young, beautiful and desirable German woman in America for ten years. Life magazine devoted a four-page story to her. As a much sought-after model, she earned almost $ 100 an hour at the New York agency Frances Gill (then 420 marks), more than one and a half times as much as a German industrial worker a month.

After her stay in the USA, she designed her own fashion. She founded Susanne Erichsen Teenager Modelle GmbH with a sales room on Kurfürstendamm and production facilities in Berlin-Tempelhof. In doing so, she introduced the term teenager into everyday German.

In 1967 she founded a mannequin and model school in Berlin, which she directed for many years.

At the beginning of 2002 she died of a stroke . Her autobiography A Mink and a Crown. The Memoirs of the German Miss Wonder (2003) was completed by co-author and editor Dorothée Hansen.

Autobiography

• Susanne Erichsen: A mink and a crown. The memories of the German fräuleinwunder . Econ, Munich, 2003; ISBN 3-430-12547-2

literature

• Veit Didczuneit, Dirk Külow: Miss Germany. The German beauty queen . S & L MedienContor, Hamburg, 1998; ISBN 3-931962-94-6

Web links

• Literature by and about Susanne Erichsen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Summary of the autobiography in the MDR-Kulturreport, March 16, 2003
• Entry on the Miss Germany website

predecessor	Office	Successor
Inge Löwenstein	Miss Germany 1950	Vera Marks